Comics have
always been something I’ve loved, perhaps because of my dyspraxia, I adore
illustrations that tell stories. As a
kid I devoured Asterix (though I missed a lot of the word jokes) and my Grandad
would keep the daily comics from his newspaper for me – Calvin and Hobbes still
makes me laugh.
Over my time at the
school I’ve found pupils are increasingly asking for comics – usually DC or
Marvel. In response I decided to run a comic club this year (shadowing the Stan
Lee Excelsior Award as part of it) and the pupils were keen to have a comic con
as one of their activities.
Comic Cons cover
far more than just comic books often taking in wider geek culture including
anything from The Muppets to Marvel but we decided that for this first year Scottish
comics was to be our focus. A team of three pupils, Stephen Toman (English
teacher) and myself hatched a plan - 42 pupils for a full day of comic fun in the
library. As this type of thing hadn’t been done before there were lots of
things we didn’t know – like would anyone want to come except us?
It turns out
that pupils did indeed want to come but as usual for teenagers they were
worryingly slow signing up. In the end I could have sold another dozen tickets
but I didn’t know that until the day before! On the day itself every pupil was given a pass (colour coded to
match photo permissions) and I issued a wee information pack beforehand which
included the programme, cosplay and general rules - after all rules still apply
even if you are dressed as god.
The pupils
organising felt a big part of comic con experience was cosplay so the
opportunity was given for dressing up and prizes awarded for the best costume.
This proved to be very popular and nearly all of the pupils attending dressed
up. We also ran a comic book stall at
lunch (shopping was also felt to be key) that gave them a chance to pick up
some cheap back issue comics (ordered from ebay and checked for appropriateness
before selling).
Staffing was
much easier Stephen and I were there all day and I pulled in teacher comic book
fans to help with various bits including cosplay checks at the start and a
Q&A panel. I also got the library monitors to help with set up and staging along
with the three comic club members.
Finding
speakers wasn’t as hard as I feared as Stephen has a couple of friends working
within the comic industry – James McCulloch who writes the comic ‘City of Lost
Souls’ (it’s very adult so he talked about the history of Scottish comics and
how he got into it) and Jess Byrne who is an illustrator with her own webcomic,
‘The God Stone’ (who did live a drawing based on pupil suggestions and shared
her experiences). I was also lucky enough to get funding from Scottish Book
Trust to get Metaphrog (John Chalmers and Sandra Marrs) who shared their
process, influences and got the pupils creating their own characters. The
afternoon session then took this further as pupils tried writing their own
comic book with Stephen’s help.
The day was
a huge success words like epic, fantabulous and inspired were all over our
evaluation sheets, as were calls to do it again. One of the S6 helpers even got
paid work from the contacts she made. Though I think my favourite bit of
feedback was a pupil bemoaning the fact they’d missed it saying ‘they didn’t
think it was going to be so good’.
Kateri Wilson-Whalley is the school librarian at The James Young High School, Livingston.
This article originally appeared on the Scottish Book Trust blog.
No comments:
Post a Comment